Display brighter-than-white color on Apple devices
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To me it doesn't make HDR content look better, but it makes the non HDR content around it just look worse.
When both are on, it's good.
However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also complicates sharing and color editing, so it’s a true “pro” feature.
(a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits.
(b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255] to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them.
(c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect of (b) under most circumstances.
(c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your face.
In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2. someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my digital camera and the photos will come out really good.
It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are technically limited in capturing it.
A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you can get way better results with digital if you know what to do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.
By the way, if brightness is not maxed this works even on the 400 nits macbook air m1, which they call EDR. They ramp up to max brightness and dim the non-HDR parts.
The switch from SDR to HDR is also interesting, when an HDR content is to be displayed it slowly fades into HDR. It must be tamping up the backlight of the LCD when tinting the SDR content simultaneously to create the gradual brightness increase effect in the HDR areas. The fact that the SDR area doesn't flicker when this happens, gives me the impression that the Apple do amazing screen calibration.
No it doesn't, I'm trying it out right now on my M1 Air. If my screen brightness is max, the video isn't extra-bright in Chrome or in Safari. If I turn down the screen brightness, it does stand out.
I don't know what you're talking about having to "blast the ambient light sensor" to get your screen to max brightness, that's not how my M1 Air works and it's not how any Mac laptop is supposed to work. That's used for "Automatically adjust brightness" (which I have on) but that's overridden at any moment just by using the brightness buttons on your keyboard to turn it up to the max. So I'm not sure how you think you've got your brightness "maxed out" but it seems you don't. You might have some other setting preventing it, like automatic screen dimming in battery mode.
Also, try not to get worked up for such stuff on the internet. Yas it appears that when plugged to the wall, it does lose the HDR-white on max brightness. Still, even on max - 1, HDR is displayed properly.
On iPhone 14 Pro, which has the ability to display full HDR content, also can't display the HDR-White when the brightness is cranked up to the max.
In my book, M1 Air and iPhone 14 Pro are both capable of displaying HDR-white. Just don't go to absolute peak brightness, which only happens under direct sunlight anyway("blast the ambient light sensor" part, simulating extremely bright environment).
Correcting misinformation isn't "getting worked up", please don't insinuate anything like that. HDR is still fairly new so it's important that misinformation doesn't spread.
And as your comment suggests, it's only because your Mac is temporarily reducing its brightness in battery mode (also sometimes due to heavy CPU usage, that the battery can't fully drive the display and chips).
But your assertion that "absolute peak brightness... only happens under direct sunlight" is false. As you yourself are seeing, you achieve the same when merely plugged in, no ambient light required.
If you want a calibrated display you will need to buy some calibration hardware! Displays change over time too...so frequent calibration is needed.
Edit: If you want to prove this to yourself grab the display profile off another mac and compare it. It will be the same.
Anyway, the profile is accurate enough that the dimming of non-HDR parts while ramping up brightness is not noticeable to me if I block off the HDR part.
On macOS you can use apps like BetterDisplay, Vivid or BetterTouchTool to enable that HDR mode for the whole display, which makes it significantly easier to work outside. On iOS there is "Vivid Browser" - a browser that enables the HDR mode for the whole screen.
It should be pretty high if the target audience is US only and mainly the higher income brackets, however.
It's just a question of percentages, do you really want to implement something that increases the brightness of your advertisement on 2-5% of your global impressions?
Entirely different story if your advertisement is a high margin product sold on the american market, especially if it's appealing to teenagers/young adults. That'd probably be over 50% of impressions, though that's just me guessing the number.
However worldwide Safari accounts for over 30%+ of mobile device impressions. That is an absolutely enormous market. It tends to be the market with the most cash in almost all markets (I'm not trying to be a booster or start some mobile platform war, and yes Samsung devices are super expensive as well, but demographically you can go to almost any country -- Japan, Russia, India, Brazil, just about everywhere, and the top n% are dominated by iPhones).
If advertisers aren't exploiting it it's either ignorance, or more likely that the dominant ad networks know it will get the ads flagged as abusive and Apple will drop the hammer.
Why are you suddenly quoting exaggerated mobile phone market share numbers in such a context?
Among all browser users, Safari accounts for a 20%+ marketshare (again, easily verified. I assume your metrics were either made up or you're just trolling?). Again almost entirely the people with the most money. Your hysterical claim that this is too small to bother with is a howler, but please keep on.
It just depends on your target audience. Some demographics have miniscule apple presence, others have them as a majority. So, depending on your target audience, it might not be worth it. Especially because we're taking about a feature that will merely increase the brightness of the ad.
Don't interpret some idiotic agenda into a simple cost/reward speculation.
Fwiw, this comment was written on an iPhone whilst procrastinating from work. Which is coding on a MacBook pro whilst checking the resulting website on an iPad Air today. I'm even using AirPods Pro to listen to music...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
Further as an advertiser I’m more interested in impressions weighted by free potential spend. A knock off device in Nigeria doesn’t factor into my calculations vs a top of the line iPhone in Norway. The latter just has more money to spend.
I have BTT and can't figure this out. Can you say how? Thanks.
Some people will worry about battery and display longevity in the comments so I'll also leave some notes I wrote on this: https://lunar.fyi/faq#xdr-safe
TLDR: yes, battery and LED lifetime will take a hit.
It's a normal consequence of driving the LEDs to a higher voltage which uses more battery power and creates more LED heat.
macOS has an ABL (automatic brightness limiter) internally that will forcefully limit the voltage based on the amount of white pixels on the screen, and based on the generated heat. That ABL works at a lower level and cannot be bypassed by apps like Lunar or Vivid.
Also for the people wondering about BTT, look for the "Toggle super brightness" action.
If they unlocked it then the devices wouldn't meet their advertised battery life, and Apple could be subject to heavy penalties from the FTC. Also one of the purported advantages of Apple Silicon would be obscured.
The CPU is also underclocked for absolute power savings, lower heat dissipation, and better compute per watt efficiency.
Headphone and speaker volume are also limited below what is possible in order to prevent hearing damage and speaker damage.
I don't know what you mean by the CPU being "underclocked", these machines don't have Intel CPUs with a base clock you can compare against. But the MacBook Pro machines are certainly capable of draining their batteries very quickly if you try, and they get quite hot in the process. Because having a whole lot of CPU and GPU compute is the very point of the MacBook Pro line. The battery life while spinning all GPU and CPU cores at 100% is certainly not a core differentiator which is highlighted in their marketing.
I would assume the iPad Air 4 doesn't have a HDR screen, but maybe I'm wrong. On HDR capable screens you should still see a huge difference even on maximum brightness.
Though - lots of non-OLED/miniLED displays have HDR... why does Apple have a different standard?
The primary use case of the included software was to highlight the focused window and dim the rest. Other than that, it was more of a chore to use.
I think this is wrong. Browsers already support HDR with other color space like this one https://oklch.com/
Letting content be arbitrarily much brighter than what the user expects seems a terrible design, easily exploitable by advertisers and all sorts of attention thieves.
It probably isn’t anything Facebook is doing.
If this is just designed for bright brief 'glints' of light in videos, I can imagine the screen itself might be being substantially overdriven, and there might well be damage if you did this for hours on end (or even maybe minutes, especially on a hot day).
OLED isn't known for longevity when displaying bright colors...
"Liquid Retina XDR" is just a high end LCD. Micro LED isn't yet on anything they sell. All apple devices phone-size and smaller currently use OLED, and everything larger uses IPS LCD.
Yes I’m aware that Mini and Micro-LED are different technology
Some other random HDR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72_rYwzLhjk
Gilchrist enters the chat.
http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/gilchrist%20(1999)%20an%...
I expect that any system can physically output colors in addition to the software definitions, including in-between colors and especially, assuming the engineers left margin for error, colors at the extremes of brightness and hue could be generated.
(not an eye specialist, but I do have a biomedical background and I don't think it's completely ridiculous to be somewhat concerned...)
It doesn’t seem like it should be a problem compared to going outside in the sun, but it is a bit unsettling to see how bright and frequent the flashes are (a Nest camera pointed at a dark room shows them clearly).
I’m not as worried about it as I am of lasers, but it’s a similar idea, maybe (very loosely speaking).
[edit] not sure why the downvotes. I have an XDR screen and it's quite distracting when my entire screen goes dark for some local video to get bright.
I think the focus should be more on the ability to interpret damaged codes via ML capabilities as most QR codes are outdoors.
(My first post-university job was doing tech support for a company which sold point-of-sale equipment. I'd say about 50% of my job was helping people with barcode scanners.)
A lot of scanning takes place out of doors - think of someone scanning e-tickets at a music festival or sports event.
While Safari has been supporting Display P3 for several years, all major browsers support since the beginning of the year CSS Color Module Level 4, which includes support for Display P3 (for all the other even larger supported color spaces there are no monitors or TV sets of reasonable price that can display them).
Most monitors come from the factory configured to display 24-bit sRGB colors, so the user must change the default settings to be able to display 30-bit Display P3 colors.
However the color space only affects the maximum saturation of the colors, not the maximum brightness of the colors, which is determined by the brightness setting of the monitor.
For a white brighter than the brightest normal white, it is not enough to have a monitor with a wide color gamut, it must also be HDR capable and the software must support HDR too.
In that case, the hue is the frequency or wavelength of the monochromatic light, the saturation is the ratio between the (weighted by the eye sensitivity curve) radiant powers of the monochromatic light and of the total light (so a completely saturated color is monochromatic, without any added white), while the brightness is the total radiant power (weighted by the eye sensitivity curve).
The red, green and blue pixel components of a display do not emit monochromatic light, unless the display is a laser projector. For any non-laser display the light emitted by a pixel component is equivalent with a mixture of a completely saturated color of the same hue with white light. This is especially obvious in the red of a sRGB display, which is much less saturated than a color that could be accepted as pure red. When two red colors have the same hue, the more saturated color is "redder", as it has less white and more red.
"Redder" is ambiguous as it can be also used when comparing colors of the same saturation and brightness but of different hues, e.g. when comparing two reddish oranges, where the redder has more red and less green, or when comparing two reddish purples, where the redder has more red and less blue. Any color display can show any color hue, the difference between the displayed color spaces is only in the maximum displayed saturation, which cannot exceed the saturation of the individual R, G and B pixel components.
When you specify RGB colors, you specify only relative values, i.e. by ratios vs. the RGB components of the brightest white light that the monitor has been configured to emit through its "brightness" setting. For instance, on a certain monitor setting the "brightness" to "75%" might mean that the brightest white has a luminance of 100 cd/m^2, while on another monitor model the same "75%" might correspond to a very different luminance of white, but in any case changing the setting will increase or decrease the brightness of all displayed colors, without changing their hues or saturations.
Both "#f0f0f0" and "#e0e0e0" are white and normally one would say that the former is brighter than the latter.
If on the axis of black to white one labels as "white" the brightest white and as "gray" the white of half brightness, then one may say that the former is "whiter" than the latter.
However this usage is not recommended, because it is ambiguous. It is much more common to say that a color is "whiter" with the intention to say that it is less saturated, i.e. it is a mixture of more white with less of a monochromatic color, than to use "white" as a synonym of "bright".
> It works by displaying a color whose brightness is way outside the standard range of sRGB color space.
> Unfortunately, this color cannot be represented with CSS colors (rgb(999,999,999) doesn’t work) or any of the widely-supported image formats. However, an HDR video can represent this color.
[1] https://notes.dt.in.th/HDRQRCode [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384625
That's why OLEDs have "perfect blacks", it's not an exaggeration, it's physically impossible to create better blacks.
I’m preparing popcorn.
Thats why we have the CIE colorspace and HSB/HSL/etc. All of those use a nonlinear geometry that better maps to the way we perceive colors.
Phone brightness is going to be adjusted automatically or manually when someone goes from somewhere bright to somewhere dark, not to mention that different phones already have different brightness.
I'm pretty sure there is already "inconsistent brightness across devices" so I don't know what this actually means.
HDR is still a niche application outside of games and VFX.
Thankfully the CSS Color v3 spec mandates a default of sRGB for #fff codes, so Firefox will have to get with the times someday soon and stop poking my eyes out with HDR-expanded sRGB colors (by default).
It is clear that higher brightness levels worsen color volume (cubes at the bottom of page 4) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323273667_Color_vol...